Through Thick and Thin (15 page)

“I said, how’s it going on the Zone?”

“The Zone?” she repeats. Caryn smiles and nods. Stephanie looks for a moment at Ivy. She focuses in on her sleeping face, her little self wrapped inside a blanket, inside her stroller, and it does help, just to see her there, just to know that with everything else, she does exist. And if Caryn and Melissa weren’t right there, she thinks she’d thank her.

“Steph?” Caryn says again, and there’s a mixture there that’s so easy to point out, an almost equal division of impatience and concern. “Are you okay?”

“Oh, sorry. I’m just so tired,” she answers, willing herself to stop thinking, willing herself to take her own best advice, to not think so much about everything. Because, really, and she’s always thought so, it’s as good advice as any. Melissa and Caryn nod in agreement. And she thinks that’s nice of them, and she thinks, really they’re nice, they’re okay. “You know, I don’t think I’m doing so well with the Zone.” Only she was, she actually really was, but then everything happened. Even though it wasn’t as if anything actually happened, it was more that what had been happening for a long time (how long?) was finally revealed.

“Did you try the Zone Perfect Delivery?” Caryn asks. Stephanie looks to both of them again, and she thinks if she were a different type of person she could tell them. Maybe not the whole story, because she’s not sure she even knows it herself, but she could tell part of it, something.

“I’m having a little trouble with perfect right now,” she says instead and they think she’s just referring to the Zone, to the delivery service, but in a way she thinks it’s the biggest admission she’s ever made.

“It can get hard, figuring out all the ratios, which is why I’m a fan of the delivery service,” Caryn says. Stephanie nods.

“Do you know the Zone made my hair fall out?” Melissa offers.

“I thought that was the South Beach Diet?” Caryn asks her, quite seriously.

Melissa looks back at her blankly for a moment. “You know, maybe it was. It can get kind of hard to keep track.”

“It can,” Caryn concedes.

“Maybe it was the South Beach Diet. Either way, losing the baby weight is just really hard,” Melissa says.

And for a moment, a moment that maybe she’ll look back on as blissful, Stephanie forgets everything for a second and adds in, “I mean look at Grace, she never really looked as good after she had her baby.”

“Grace from
Will & Grace
you mean?” Caryn asks.

“Uh-huh,” Stephanie says.

“Yes,” Melissa says, “I know
exactly
what you mean.” And they all stare out the window, and Stephanie thinks that maybe, when this is all over, she and Melissa might be friends.

“Anyway,” Melissa says after a while, “do you know what I’m doing now, and I
love
it?”

“What?” Caryn asks. Stephanie is listening.

“I’ve heard great things,” Caryn says, nodding her approval.

“Hmm,” Stephanie says, “maybe I’ll try it.” As she says it, she thinks that maybe this, the baby weight, as hard as it has been to fix, maybe it’ll be the easy thing. Maybe out of all the things that need fixing, this is the only one she can.

As soon as they leave Starbucks, as soon as they each go their separate ways, to spend the rest of their weekends with their husbands or whatever it is they’re going to do, Stephanie heads right over to Bookends and picks up a copy of
French Women Don’t Get Fat
from the large kiosk right by the cash register. It’s a pretty book, pink with a nice illustration of a woman on the cover, a woman who isn’t fat. She pays for the book and they put it in a bag for her. She pushes Ivy’s stroller with one hand, and holds on to the book with the other. She has this feeling. This feeling like, with both hands, she’s holding on for dear life.

Meredith pulls on a sweatshirt. She pairs it with a pair of black microfiber/fleece combo pants that she ordered from the Athleta catalogue and has, ever since, been quite in love with. She laces up her Nikes, the same ones from before, the ones you could run in, were you so inclined. Athletic clothes. As she roots around for her keys, she thinks she should, especially with the weight loss goals and all, endeavor to be more athletic. An endeavor perhaps larger than an outfit. Not triathalon training or anything, she doesn’t think she’d have to go that far. Though it certainly wouldn’t fall inside the areas of her expertise, she imagines that what with the swimming and the running and the biking, and quite a lot of it, that training for a triathalon would take a fair amount of time. And, really, who has that kind of time? So, somewhere between an outfit and a triathalon.

To Barnes & Noble,
she thinks as she heads out the door,
The Atkins Diet Revolution.

“Hi,” she says softly as she walks by the doorman. They don’t actually open the doors here. If they did, she’d have more to say, she could say, “Thank you,” of course, for opening the door. The doormen here, they more sit behind a desk. She’s not sure which doorman it is today, and it’s not because she’s oblivious, it’s more that she’s just never had a strong relationship with the doormen, porters, handymen, lobby staff who rotate through her building. She isn’t the type to require a lot of help in the apartment. She can change a lightbulb or unclog a drain as well as the next person, and the staff seems to change a lot, that happens in the big buildings. It all seems so anonymous.

The air is cool as she walks out onto Third Avenue, and she remembers that it’s now March. It’s actually very nice out, considering it’s March. Nice weather in New York doesn’t happen nearly as often as you’d think it would, especially if you get your ideas about New York weather from watching all the movies set in New York, so many of them taking place in the midst of some really beautiful weather. It’s not like that, not nearly often enough. Remembering her recent thoughts on athleticism, she decides to walk across the park, over to the West Side, to the Barnes & Noble right by Ouest. She wonders now if maybe there was a reason she kept getting out on that corner by mistake. And anyway, she does like the Upper West Side.

It’s true, she does long to call neighborhoods in New York other than the Upper East Side her own—she’s had her moments with many of them—but with the Upper West Side, it’s different; it’s more now than just longing, it’s crossed the line from longing to lust. Years ago, she never would have predicted it. Years ago, in fact, when she felt romantically inclined toward Gramercy, toward lower Fifth Avenue and University Place, she wasn’t particularly interested in the Upper West Side. She didn’t think there were any good restaurants there, even though that wasn’t actually true as Picholine had been there forever, as had Café des Artistes, and even Café Luxembourg.

But yet,
she thinks, as she heads west, entering the park, and veering off the path,
look at the restaurants there now.
Ouest, of course, and Aix, Telepan, and ’Cesca, Per Se, and an outpost of Rosa Mexicano. She could do an entire series, a survey if you will, on Upper West Side restaurants. She should move there.

She fishes her iPod out of her bag. Have mini iPod, will travel. She pauses for a moment, considering if she should select a certain artist, album, or mix. She usually does, but there’s something in the air, the air that feels so much like springtime (and for someone who doesn’t exactly love winter that feels a little bit like freedom). As she heads through Central Park, in a burst of spontaneity, she selects
Shuffle.
That John Denver is currently playing does of course make her question the whole “leaving the music selection to chance” decision, but she doesn’t let herself regrab the iPod and rearrange it. Instead, she pulls her sunglasses out of her bag and puts them on as John Denver sings,
“I’ll walk in the rain by your side.”

She approaches the large intersection at Seventy-ninth Street and Broadway, the one with the Apthorp building (which she loves) on one corner and a Gothic stone church on the other. Right as she’s crossing, suddenly her attention is caught. A small tent has been set up right in front of the church, in the small space that’s there, just to the side of the subway entrance. This tent, it’s the kind that doesn’t have sides or walls, just the top. It’s red and white striped and has red triangular flags hanging down from the edges, the types of flags that always put Meredith in mind of just-opened manicure shops. And also, this tent, it seems to be magnetic, the way it’s pulling at her. Meredith has to pause for a moment and very seriously contemplate if the metal poles that are holding up the red and white striped material, if actually they are made of magnets and it is she who is made of metal in the manner of the Tin Man. She’s not really the type to say,
Oh, look at the tent,
she’s always been the type to just walk past, and she’s always been okay with that. And yet here she is, feeling so pulled. If she were in a science fiction novel, the words “right into the center of its vortex” would surely make an appearance. And so she goes there, to the tent.

There are four long tables set up inside the tent, along each of the four sides. The tables have blue plastic tablecloths over them. There are different banners, and cages with dogs in them, and there is quite a lot of barking. Along one side there is a banner larger than all the others:
NYC Loves Dogs Adoption Day.

And then she sees him.

There, directly in front of her, under a banner that says
DCNY Rescue,
at the table that is by far the quietest of the four, she sees him, this tiny sausage-shaped creature, peering out from between the bars of a metal makeshift pen. He really does seem to be staring right at her. She’s quite sure of it. And the way he stares, it is so purposeful. There is such focus, but with a touch, just around the edges, of concern. She makes a beeline across the tent, directly to him. His pen has been placed on the table so she only has to bend down halfway to be exactly on his level.

“Hello,” she says softly, and behind him, she can see his little tail wag. The wag is not exuberant; it’s cautious, just once to the right and once to the left. Zip zip, and then it’s still. He is rather short of leg, but he seems so long on personality, and on wisdom. Meredith looks into his chocolate-brown eyes, so soulful, she thinks, so dark. Dogs for her are not like restaurants or New York neighborhoods or what’s on her iPod and what song, exactly, will play next; dogs aren’t something she knows a lot about. But she thinks she remembers hearing once that staring right into a dog’s eyes could be considered, by the dog, to be an act of aggression. As this little dog’s eyes sparkle back at her, she thinks whoever said that must have been wrong. She doesn’t think she’s ever had an easier time staring into anyone’s eyes. And she doesn’t think she’s met anyone yet who has made such an effortless, flawless, unhindered go at staring back into hers.

His eyes, they really do sparkle, don’t they? As she takes a step back, the sausage-shaped dog, he gets up on his hind legs for a moment, a thoroughly charming moment, and from there he moves his two front paws forward in a swoop. She thinks, were it not for the makeshift pen between them, she could have just received five, a low five, but five all the same. She’s heard that some dogs, if you take the time to pay the right kind of attention to them, will smile at you, and she thinks this one just has.

She regards him as he settles back down onto four paws with an exuberant toss of his head. He looks back up at her brightly, intently, and when she sees his expression, she is immediately put back in mind of the word
purpose.
She thinks he surely does have an important purpose and that he is aware of that, and for a moment she forgets everything else.

Oh,
she thinks, as he raises his paw again. She wonders if she’s ever truly been in love prior to this moment. Because never before in her thirty-three years has she ever looked into a pair of eyes, has she ever looked at anything, and felt like such a goner.

“Hello.” Meredith hears this and she gets very nervous, because for a second she thinks she might have just heard the dog say hello, but as she looks up, she sees that two women have materialized behind the table as if from nowhere. One is very tall and slender, born with Leslie-like genes, though without the fashion sense. The other is shorter, plumper. Meredith wishes she hadn’t just used the adjective
plump.
It would be so much better if she hadn’t thought that. She thinks to herself, just call her the shorter one, the one with frizzy hair, the one wearing overalls without any irony at all.

They step out from behind the table and come at Meredith from their two different directions, and Meredith has the distinct sensation that they are gliding toward her. She takes a step back.

“Hello,” they each say, and it is almost in unison but not quite, the sound is not a chorus but an echo, and Meredith notices that each of the two women, dressed so similarly, are both wearing white buttons that say in red and blue letters,
DCNY.
She doesn’t know what DCNY stands for; she wonders if this tent is political. She hadn’t thought so, and she hopes it isn’t.